The Dell Community has contributed: 9376 ideas | promoted 641936 times | 71542 comments

How IdeaStorm Works:

Post Promote Discuss See
Forum | Ideas
160

Data Center Energy reduction

160 points posted to by danapep Jan 9 **IN PROGRESS**

I know these numbers are not precise, but in broad terms power consumption in a data center to my understanding is roughly:

1/3 waste spilled off as heat in stepping down electricity for low power components
1/3 cooling
1/3 functional computing capacity

Is there not some way we could eliminate the first 1/3, thus eliminating the need for the second third, and thereby cutting power use by 2/3.

I am no electrical engineer, but it seems to me if we think of a data center as a whole instead of one computer at a time and re-engineer servers accordingly, we could drastically reduce the expense and environmental impact.

danapep
Jan 9		 Maybe you wire the entire build for DC power.
iv2101
Jan 9		 you should learn some elementary statistical mechanics and entropy. Then you won't be surprised by the (necessary) heat loss.
danapep
Jan 9		 I understand there is inefficiency in power transition resulting in heat production, I am talking about the intentional stepping down of power. A computer's internal components do not run directly off 110 AC.
danapep
Jan 9		 In other words use economy of scale...instead of stepping AC 110 power down 50,000 times for 50,000 servers, wire the whole building for DC 12v
iv2101
Jan 10		 there have been plenty of smart people thinking about this back when dc was used (beginning of the 20th century). The reason for using ac is the ability to transform the voltage (you need different voltages in one motherboard). The reason for using high voltage is higher efficiency - less power loss in the wires. Some labs have large scale power adapter used by non-standard equipment. The point is that there HAS to be a (small) heat loss at a transformer and a (quite substantial) heat loss at the processor.
danapep
Jan 10		 Likely a more cost effective way of doing this is at the rack. It is certainly rack mounted systems that would be the target of this kind of initiative. But you would still have to modify the server architecture to accept a secondary low power input.
danapep
Jan 10		 iv2101 re: you're second comment...then maybe this idea is not the solution, maybe it's the new 3D chips from IBM, or something else. The point is I know of projects with new capital hardware purchases of 1 million new servers each. What we have doesn't scale, the way technology proliferation is exploding. We can't be throwing away 2/3 of power use on overhead, not only is it costly for business, its extremely bad for the environment.
jdelidc
Jan 10		 DC power don't transmit as efficiently as AC power. the simple reason is that if you have a 200 watt server, it takes 2 amps out here in japan at 100 volts, or 16 amps running off 12 volts (watts = volts x amps) . more amps over a longer distance means more resistance and more heat. i'm not an expert either (only went through physics 101 and stopped) but my guess is that converting the entire place to DC will increase the step-down heat and will also increase the functional heat. what they need to do is work on decreasing functional heat so that you don't have as much of the other heat.

now i miss my physics class
matt_d
Jan 14		 Power and Cooling is a huge initiative within Dell, and we recognize that the consumption of the data center as a whole needs to improve. We're working on all aspects of this challenge, not focusing solely on say CPU power consumption.
matt_d
Jan 19		 Changed status to **IN PROGRESS**.
jdelidc
Jan 19		 don't think this will ever change status from that. there's probably always going to be a way to use less electric
Please log in to post a comment
recently promoted by: